Staff Recommendations
Pages
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The false friend : a novel
by Goldberg, Myla.
Reviewed by: Mary McCoy, Senior Librarian, Art, Music, & Recreation DepartmentAugust 8, 2011
Call Number: F
Eleven-year-olds Celia Durst and Djuna Pearson are best friends, queen bees, and mean girls, as likely to turn on each other as the wannabes and hangers-on who vie for their favor. Until one day after school, when Djuna gets into a stranger's brown sedan and disappears forever.
Twenty years later, Celia is suddenly overcome by a long-repressed memory that packs a wallop. There was no brown sedan, there was no stranger. Celia remembers that the story she told their friends, parents, and the police wasn't the truth, that something very different happened to Djuna that day in... Read Full Review
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The girl who fell from the sky : a novel
by Durrow, Heidi W.
Reviewed by: Mary McCoy, Senior Librarian, Art, Music, & Recreation DepartmentAugust 1, 2011
Call Number: F
Born to a Danish mother and an African American G.I. father, and raised in Europe, Rachel has never thought of herself as black or white. But when a family tragedy sends her to Portland to live with her grandmother in a predominantly African American community, 11-year-old Rachel suddenly finds herself defined by her race. Though her grandmother is loving and provides Rachel with more stability than she's ever had in her life, she doesn't understand why her black grandchild would sing the Danish words to Christmas carols under her breath at church or crave pastries made with... Read Full Review
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Bossypants
by Fey, Tina, 1970-
Reviewed by: Christa Deitrick, Librarian, Literature & Fiction DepartmentJuly 22, 2011
Call Number: 812.092 F433
Although I went in fully prepared to find this book at least mildly irritating (à la The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman, or pretty much anything by Chelsea Handler, whose titles are always better than her books), Bossypants turned out to be an entertaining read that's perfect for a weekend chuckle or to unwind with before bedtime.
Tina Fey starts off by describing her early years as a half-Greek doof growing up in Pennsylvania (the back cover photo is priceless). After a theatre-geeky romp through college, Fey moved to Chicago, studying and performing improv with the venerable... Read Full Review
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Hellhound on his trail : the stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the international hunt for his assassin
by Sides, Hampton.
Reviewed by: Mary McCoy, Senior Librarian, Art, Music, & Recreation DepartmentJuly 20, 2011
Call Number: 323.4092 K53Si
In April 1967, James Earl Ray escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary by smuggling himself out of the prison bakery in a breadbox. He drifted to Mexico, then to Los Angeles, where he attended bartending school and volunteered for the presidential campaign of Alabama Governor and staunch segregationist George Wallace. During this time, Ray's racist beliefs became an obsession, and he became fixated on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - so fixated that in 1968, Ray left California, and began to stalk King through the American South.
At the same time, King was planning a bold new... Read Full Review
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The irresistible Henry House : a novel
by Grunwald, Lisa.
Reviewed by: Mary McCoy, Senior Librarian, Art, Music, & Recreation DepartmentJuly 18, 2011
The premise of Grunwald's charming novel was inspired by a home economics curriculum studied by many young women at American colleges during the first half of the 20th century. To help students gain hands-on experience in homemaking and child-rearing, local orphanages would supply colleges with a "practice baby" to be looked after by student "mothers."
Baby Henry comes to the Wilton College home economics practice house in 1946, and finds himself with seven loving mothers. But instead of being returned to the orphanage at the end of the school year, Henry... Read Full Review
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The Devil and Sherlock Holmes
by Grann, David.
Reviewed by: Mary McCoy, Senior Librarian, Art, Music, & Recreation DepartmentJuly 11, 2011
Call Number: 364.1 G759
A fascinating collection of investigative journalism about real-life mysteries, baffling crimes, and eclectic curiosities by the bestselling author of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
Many of the collection's best essays deal with criminal cases. The book's title comes from the piece "Mysterious Circumstances," where Grann investigates the suspicious death of one of the world's leading Sherlock Holmes scholars, while in... Read Full Review
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The tiger : a true story of vengeance and survival
by Vaillant, John
Reviewed by: Mary McCoy, Senior Librarian, Art, Music, & Recreation DepartmentJuly 5, 2011
Call Number: 799.26 V131
In the rugged Primorye region of Russia's Far East, people have shared the Boreal Forest with Amur (or Siberian) tigers for hundreds of years. "If I don't touch her," the local saying goes, "she won't touch me." But in December 1997, that delicate arrangement was threatened when a poacher named Markov shot a tiger at close range, wounding its leg. Over the next several days, the tiger carried out what seemed like a vendetta, tracking, harassing, and eventually killing the poacher.
Enter Inspection Tiger, a forest police unit, responsible for monitoring... Read Full Review
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Let's take the long way home : a memoir of friendship
by Caldwell, Gail, 1951-
Reviewed by: Mary McCoy, Senior Librarian, Art, Music, & Recreation DepartmentJune 27, 2011
Call Number: 071.092 C147-1
It would be difficult to imagine two friends more well-matched, more made for one another, as Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp. When the two met, both were writers, athletes, and dog lovers. Both were recovering alcoholics, and both were entering middle age, quite contentedly single. Caldwell writes, "Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived." And then, in 2002, Caroline died, just seven weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
Caldwell's beautiful memoir... Read Full Review